What's New?

Why yes, its been excitingly busy at the mill recently and we will get to share that and be excitingly busy in public too soon!

We are very very very close to publishing ISA specs and there are more talks scheduled. As usual, subscribe to the mailing list or visit the forums regularly to get details.

Ivan will give a keynote at this year’s Open Source Days in Copenhagen: http://www.opensourcedays.org/2014/ – finally a chance for us Europeans to hear him live.

If anyone’s interested I managed to find the RSS feed url for the whole forum. It’s not very active at the moment so it’s easy to keep up with it in my RSS reader, NewsBlur. If you want additional options like filtering sub forums etc, I believe this uses the built-in wordpress rss engine so a quick search for additional query parameters might work, though at the current volume that’s hardly necessary.

http://millcomputing.com/?feed=rss2&post_type=forum

Greetings all,

I seem to recall reading (months?) of an upcoming presentation on the abstract Mill, viewed as a virtual machine. If I recall, this was by somebody other than Ivan, possibly not an official Millcomputing person. (Please forgive me if I’m mis-remembering, my memory of what I read is hazy.)

Unvarnished opinion: The most popular VMs (e.g. those for Java) use a stack model, imposing a one-at-a-time execution model. I believe that the stack-based JVM is a main reason why Java performance isn’t so hot.

Does this ring a bell with anybody? If so, any pointers to an abstract, slides and/or video would be much appreciated.
—-

Bye the way, the Wiki (although it’s pre-official-announcement-of-readiness) now has — when it’s up — some fascinating new-to-me info on, among other things:

* The instruction set,

* The Mill abstract assembler grammar (Interestingly IMHO, it exposes few Mill-ish aspects other than supported widths and gangs),

* More on instruction decoding,

* Two new phases, and

* More detail on the tin, copper, silver and gold cores, including more slot and FU details. (Note that these are almost certainly in flux.)

Enjoy!

PS Millcomputing folks. Please feel free to delete this post if I’ve mentioned things you’d rather not yet have on the forums. If so, my apologies.

Will,

Thanks for your answer; Terje Mathisen’s talk “Are virtual machines the future?” is exactly what I was looking for!

I’m pleased to report that somebody did record that talk and it’s up on vimeo at:
http://vimeo.com/108094559 (at least for now. You folks might want to download it and put it on your own website.)

FYI, here’s the abstract:

Mill Computing has been working for over a decade to develop a brand new, highly scalable CPU architecture. The scalability is partly achieved by having no fixed machine/assembly language, instead all programs are compiled to an intermediate (VM) machine. Upon installation on the actual target machine, a specializer is run which converts the intermediate representation into the current format. The Mill’s most unique features include having no actual registers, the ability to run completely out of cache with no actual RAM memory, an instruction set which is size-agnostic (the same opcode can work on 8, 16, 32, 64 or 128-bit variables or vectors) as well as being able to unroll algorithms in a way that would cause traps and crashes on classic architectures.

Hi,

It has been a while since the latest news/updates/talks, so I wanted to ask about the current status of the project.
Is there any exciting stuff in the pipe or info you can share (e.g. status of the (cloud)-simulator, financing, upcoming talks)?

It’s much appreciated. Thanks!

Upcoming talk, on the Mill response to the Spectre family of attacks, at the Strange Loop Conference in St. Louis September 26-29.

Progress on other fronts is currently hush-hush.